20 Greatest Horror Villains Of The 2020s (So Far)

Though we're only about halfway through the 2020s so far, it's already been one hell of a decade for the horror genre

All the way through the challenging pandemic years, horror remained fertile and lucrative

a testament to how the genre connects with the masses and has fostered a global community of fans

But how great can any horror film really be without an equally great villain

The problem, inevitably, is that it's tough to come up with a genuinely unique and memorable horror antagonist these days

considering we've all seen dozens, even hundreds of renditions of ghosts, monsters, mass killers, and so on

But these horror movies all prove there's still plenty of room for villains who are either original

or in the very least extremely strong iterations of well-worn archetypes. I'm Ellie for WhatCulture and let's take a look at the greatest horror villains of the 2020s so far

Starting with Pearl. X and Pearl. Ty West's ex introduced the world to Pearl, an elderly, unrelentingly horny woman who, with her husband Howard

preys upon the young, attractive folk who rent out their farmhouse to shoot a porn film

Pearl is implied to be jealous of their youth and sexuality, and so she and her hubby go about wiping the lot of them out

which they almost succeed at, save for sole survivor Maxine Minx. And West cemented Pearl as an all-time horror villain in her self-titled prequel

where Mia Goth dives into Pearl's earlier life as an angry young woman living a cloistered

existence in rural Texas. Fascinating though it is to see Pearl become the serial killer we later

know her as, it's Goth's Oscar-worthy performance that well and truly pushes the character over the

top, cemented by a mesmerising long-take monologue that few are likely to forget

The Grabber, The Black Phone. There haven't been nearly enough truly iconic masked killers in

horror movies this decade so far. So The Black Phones' The Grabber definitely supplied an

underserved genre niche. For one, The Grabber is just a fundamentally creepy-looking piece of work

But behind his eerie mask is a flesh-and-blood man who abducts and kills children in plain sight

amid an unaware suburbia. Ethan Hawke's casting is also key here. The actor has rarely played

villains throughout his career for fear of being typecast, so it's a unique treat to see him

perform with such unrelenting menace. And yet Hawke underplays a potentially over-the-top

antagonist, his voice and subtle physical movements ensuring he always cuts a pulse-quickening

presence. In fact, Hawke was so damn good in the role that director Scott Derrickson couldn't resist

but bring him back from the dead for The Black Phone 2, having him live on as a Freddy Krueger-esque

dreamstalker, because why the heck not? Frank, barbarian. Horror villains don't get much more

stomach-churningly vile than Frank from Barbarian, a man who spent years abducting and sexually

assaulting young women, in turn getting them pregnant and then repeating the very same abuse

on their children. Though Frank doesn't get much screen time throughout Zach Greger's gonzo horror

flick and spends the entirety of the present-day timeline confined to a bed, he makes one hell of

an impression as the father of the grotesque mutant woman stalking the bowels of his home

And of course, the ever-great Richard Brake is one of the all-time best weirdo character actors

so it's little surprise that he gave a supremely chilling performance in the role

As outlandish as Barbarian ultimately is, there's still a real, grounded core to Frank's character

People like him do exist, and that's so much scarier than even the creepiest of supernatural

entities. Johnny, in a violent nature. Again, there's been a disappointing lack of truly

statuesque and memorable slasher villains as of late. But in a violent nature came totally out of

nowhere and gave us one for the ages. Though Chris Nash's film is a deconstructionist riff on the

prototypical slasher, shot and staged as an art house film, Nash still managed to deliver a

genuinely great villain in Hulking serial killer Johnny. Johnny is very obviously inspired by

Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees, an absolute unit who wears a cool mask and saunters around

hacking up unsuspecting young folk who cross his path in the picturesque outdoors

While his lore and characterisation certainly aren't as deep as the horror villains on this

list go, Johnny is a prime example of a simple but effective antagonist

His firefighter mask looks great, and he's responsible for at least a few of the most

memorable kills of any recent horror movie, especially one involving a certain yoga-practicing

young lady. With a sequel currently in production, hopefully it'll firmly establish Johnny as a pure genre icon

Megan? Megan. Before the first trailer for Blumhouse's killer android movie Megan dropped

nobody could have predicted just how iconic a character she would become

The deliciously tongue-in-cheek marketing did a fantastic job of showing off Megan's delightfully

sassy demeanor, flamboyant killing methods, and of course her lifelike yet uncanny design

And given that concerns about the proliferation of AI began to hit the mainstream just as the was released everything about the character conception feels quite perfectly timed Megan was a meme months before her first film ever came out

and the movie itself absolutely surpassed expectations, cementing her as one of the most distinctive and memorable horror antagonists in years

It's a shame that the sequel flopped at the box office, largely due to shifting away from horror to sci-fi action

making it quite possible that we've already seen the last of this undeniably fascinating

and hilarious villain. But even if Megan 3.0 never materializes, genre fans will still remember her

years and years from now. Adrian Griffin, The Invisible Man Lee Warnell's new take on The Invisible Man was considerably better than most were surely expecting

and this is in large part because Warnell managed to ground the outlandish premise within the

context of a post-MeToo world. Our villain, Adrian Griffin, is swiftly introduced as the vile

abusive partner of protagonist Cecilia. And once Cecilia manages to escape his fortified home

it's soon revealed that Adrian has killed himself. But of course, Adrian actually hasn't died. He has

instead faked his own death and then uses his invisible bodysuit to torment Cecilia, even

causing those closest to her to question her sanity. It's a brilliantly clever, genre-infused

take on gaslighting. And even though Adrian isn't physically visible in the film for very long

his eerie presence is felt in pretty much every single scene. Needless to say, when Cecilia turns the tables on Adrian at the end

and uses one of his own bodysuits to kill him, in turn staging it to look like a suicide, it's ludicrously satisfying

Count Orlok Nosferatu Even though Count Orlok made his cinematic debut over 100 years ago in 1922's original Nosferatu

and is himself inspired by Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel

writer-director Robert Eggers and actor Bill Skarsgård made the character feel wholly new

in their recent remake. Eggers leans hard into the grotesque nature of Orlok, presented here as

a legitimately corpse-like entity who indeed looks like an undead nobleman rather than a more

heightened monster as in the original 1922 film. But the bold choice to end all bold choices

of course, is that moustache, and while some found Orlok's prominent lip caterpillar

unintentionally comical, it absolutely suited Edgar's conception of Orlok as a corrupted man

rather than an abstract entity. Between all this, the incredible makeup and costuming

and of course Garsgård's magnificent performance in the role, we were given a new Orlok to rule

them all, and quite possibly the single most terrifying Dracula or Dracula-adjacent character

ever committed to screen. The Electric Lady, Strange Darling. Much of the brilliance of

Strange Darling's villain lies in the fact that it just isn't what audience expect at all. The

marketing for the film sold J.T. Molnar's twisted horror thriller as a cat and mouse game between a

young woman and the psychopath chasing her down. But per the movie's non-linear structure, we don't

learn the truth until the halfway point, that the woman is actually a serial killer called the

Electric Lady and the psychopath is really one of her justifiably pissed off intended victims

who just so happens to also be a cop. Willa Fitzgerald gives a phenomenal performance in

the role, lending enormous dimension to a character who could easily come off one note

in the hands of a lesser cast and crew. Instead, she's a fascinating and expectation-defying example

of a horror villain driven to kill through compulsion to eliminate anyone who she perceives

as a devil rather than a human being. The monkey. The monkey. Osgood Perkins did wonders by making

a cursed inanimate object one of the most compelling, even iconic horror foes of recent

years in his new film, The Monkey. The villain is ultimately a cursed wind-up toy monkey

which, whenever its wind-up key is turned, will cause random, insane deaths in its vicinity

Much of the fun here lies in the sheer, unbridled, unpredictable chaos that the monkey causes

There's no telling who will die or the utterly deranged Final Destination-esque manner in which

they might expire. Despite the monkey again not being alive in the technical sense and having no

voice or any outward characteristics, it still manages to be one of the most eerie horror villains

of recent times. It's all about actions, and considering some of the sicko death scenes this

thing conjures up, its place in horror history feels rightly cemented. For anyone fed up with

typical masked slashes and generic monsters, this cursed toy is quite the antidote. Dr. Cecilia

Peterson Saw X. Saw X pulled off an impressive narrative sleight of hand by transitioning the

jigsaw killer John Kramer into something of an anti-hero role by having him face off against

an antagonist who was even more vile and sadistic than himself. And that person is Dr. Cecilia

Peterson, a con artist who scams terminally ill cancer patients out of their life savings

in exchange for an experimental, apparently miraculous treatment. Flaky though Kramer's own moral code is At least the guy isn taking advantage of the most vulnerable people in society There are no lessons to be taught here merely a hall of fame tier sociopath robbing dying folk of their money Fans were certainly excited to see Cecilia get a well demise at Kramer hands then

and so were surely disappointed that she actually survived the events of the movie

even if her precise fate remains firmly up in the air. We can only hope that the recently green-lit

Saw 11 will pick this thread back up and give Cecilia the miserable end she so obviously deserves

RATMA VHS 94 Though the VHS franchise is wildly hit and miss, as is the case with most horror anthologies

every so often it rustles up an antagonist so damn good that audiences actually scream

out for them to get their own standalone movie. And in recent years it was VHS 94's Storm Drain

which struck gold with RATMA, the fabled sewer-dwelling man-rat creature commonly referred

to as the Ratman. For one, Ratma is just innately repulsive, a disgusting, beast-like thing which

vomits a caustic liquid capable of burning a person's flesh clean off. And if that's not enough

Ratma also has a cult of followers who believe it will help them build a new world, prompting them

to chant, Hail Ratma. Ratma quickly became something of a viral hit following the film's

release. And even though four years have passed, the nightmarish entity still remains one of the

most beloved in the series' storied history. Ratmother movie when? Nobody. Bodies, Bodies

Bodies. And now for an entirely unlikely entry on this list, because when we say that the villain

in Murder Mystery Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is nobody, we're not talking about some metaphysical

entity. Quite literally, there's no real villain. The movie's horrendously self-involved, obnoxious

characters swiftly start turning on one another after David is apparently brutally murdered early

on. His throat haven't been slashed with a cookery. But the big hilarious payoff is that, in fact

David wasn't murdered at all. He accidentally cut his own throat while trying to open a champagne

bottle with the cookery. That is to say, all of the paranoia-laced deaths that followed were

totally preventable if cooler heads prevailed. In that respect, you could argue that everybody

was a villain by so thoroughly abandoning logic. But at the same time, the shadowy murderer everyone

expected to be the culprit was nothing more than a collective fantasy conjured in the wake of an

admittedly improbable, insanely gnarly accident. Laura, Bring Her Back. Danny and Michael Philippot's

Bring Her Back is a bleak examination of grief in which a bereaved mother, Laura, attempts to enact

a demonic resurrection ritual on one of her foster children in order to bring her late daughter back

to life. Sally Hawkins gives a phenomenal Oscar-worthy performance as Laura, a character

who has suffered devastating loss, as makes her innately sympathetic if not for the fact that her

obsession with bringing her child back from death has overridden all other logic. Laura's increasingly

uneasy and erratic behavior is deeply discomforting to watch, until it explodes into outright murder

in the final stretch once her carefully laid plan begins to unfurl. The result is a mesmerizing

turn from Hawkins, who has helped create one of the most unhinged horror villains of this year or

any other, even if the film never strays too far from the overpowering sadness at the core of her

dysfunction. Brendan, fresh. An easy way for a horror villain to well and truly stick with

audiences is for them to cast an actor wildly against type. And that's precisely what happened

with Sebastian Stan's Brendan in Fresh. Brendan is introduced as Steve, a charming hunk who has

a chance encounter with the romantically disillusioned Noah, causing a whirlwind romance

to ensue. But of course, if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And Steve is

actually the worst in a long line of trash men Noah has dated. In this case, Steve slash Brendan

happens to be a cannibal who imprisons Noah in order to surgically remove the meat from her body

to sell to wealth cannibals. Yep, that's quite a turnaround from Marvel fan favourite Bucky Barnes

and Stan gives a sublimely creepy performance in the role of a man who clearly relishes every

second of his nauseating vocation. Though it's all too relieving when Brendan is finally killed

at film's end, Stan gives such a riotously entertaining turn that you might actually

miss him a little bit. Remick, Sinners. The vampire subgenre feels so thoroughly done to death

in 2025, so it's especially impressive that Ryan Coogler breathed such confident new life into it

with his southern fried horror Sinners. And while the film has so much going for it

where would it be without its blood-sucking lead vamp, Remick? Though at first it appears that

Remick might be a rather shallow stand-in for white supremacists. He's actually far more

interesting than that, an ancient Irish immigrant who wishes to build himself a new family of

vampires in order to compensate for his own lost community. But as infectiously entertaining as

that Irish jig might be? Make no mistake, he's still a savagely violent villain any way you slice

it, albeit one with considerably greater dimension than your average vampire pack leader

Jack O is also terrific in the role ensuring Remick is a villain the audience can at least understand even as aspects of his backstory remain enticingly vague Mona Wasserman Bo is

Afraid. Ariasta's Bo is Afraid is most certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but this absurdist

psychological horror comedy is nothing if not a bold attempt to do something wildly different with

the genre. And at the core of its story, the villain-tormenting protagonist Bo is his mother

Mona, who faked her own death at the start of the film and has been surreptitiously spying on her son

ever since. Mona is the prototypical mother from hell, an obnoxiously overbearing woman who resents

Beau for not giving her enough attention. She's been listening in on his therapy sessions, has

imprisoned his twin brother and father in her home, and then put her own son on trial for his perceived

slights against her. Obviously, the reality of the film becomes ever more dubious once Mona shows up

but she's ultimately one of horror's all-time great examples of an abusive parent as genre

villain. Julian Slowick, The Menu. The Menu was a deliciously entertaining black comedy horror in

which a group of diners find themselves preyed upon by their psychopathically pissed-off celebrity

chef for the evening, Julian Slowick. Despite his composed veneers, Slowick has actually invited the

various guests to his fancy night of dining because they've all in some way contributed to

him losing his love of cooking. His revenge? To kill every single person in the restaurant by the

end of the night. His guests, his willing kitchen staff, and also himself. It's a fantastically

twisted setup, and Ralph Fiennes does a marvellous job of making a potentially cartoonish antagonist

not only relatively relatable, but even sympathetic to a point. His methods are undeniably extreme

yes, but to see a chef of his position thumb his nose so decisively at superficial foodie culture

and everything it encompasses is tremendously satisfying. Despite having obviously lost his

mind, Sloic maintains a composed calm for the most part, as makes him all the more intimidating

when the violence ramps up. For his part in bringing Sloic to life, Fiennes went on to

receive a well-earned Best Actor Golden Globe nomination, Aunt Gladys Weapons. Zach Kregger's Weapons impressively one-upped his previous film, Barbarian

with an even more fascinating and unforgettable antagonist, the literally mesmerizing Aunt Gladys

From her baffling sense of style to her chilling mode of speech and all-around aura

Gladys is a deeply unsettling villain, a witch who preys upon children in Maybrook, Pennsylvania

to sustain herself. Kreger sensibly doesn't go overboard filling the audience in on all the

finer details, but gives us enough to know that Gladys is most likely an ancient witch

who has been enchanting and manipulating communities for centuries for her own gain

Oscar nominee Amy Madigan disappeared completely into the role, being both physically unrecognisable and giving a performance quite unlike any she has before

Expect Gladys to be a popular Halloween costume for years and years to come

and on top of all this, she also gets one of the most brilliantly satisfying death scenes of any horror villain ever

when she's viciously torn apart by the very children she took control of

Deadite Ellie Evil Dead Rise The Evil Dead franchise has served up its fair share of unforgettable Deadite villains

but it well and truly outdid itself with Evil Dead Rise and its central antagonist

the Deadite-possessed Ellie. For starters, actress Alyssa Sutherland's incredible striking looks make her appear positively diabolic in Deadite form, to say nothing of her bracingly intense

physical performance, making her one of the most viscerally terrifying antagonists in the entire

franchise. In the Deadite tradition, Ellie also has a ton of fun mocking both her sister Beth and

her three children, chillingly telling her kids, mommy's with the maggots now. And even for the

standards of Deadites, Ellie is mean, given that she ultimately causes the death of two of her three

children, leaving behind only her youngest daughter, Cassie. As such, there's an obvious underlayer of

tragedy to all this, that Ellie's body is hijacked and perverted to such depraved ends, and so when

she's finally fed into a wood chipper at the end, it feels like a huge mercy. And finally

Art the Clown, Terrifier franchise. Really, could there be another number one pick than Art the

Clown from the Terrifier franchise? Though it's absolutely fair to point out that the first

Terrifier actually released back in 2016, and Art had appeared in two short films prior to this

it had a relatively muted initial release and didn't become a cult hit until the post-pandemic

era. The enormous success of Terrifier 2 cemented Art's place in the genre pantheon

his playful penchant for nauseating torture and dismemberment elevated at all turns by the

physical performance of the brilliant David Howard Thornton, who ensures Art is more than

just another creepy clown antagonist. By the time Terrifier 3 arrived last year

it was pretty much indisputable that Art was one of the few truly iconic horror mascots of the 2020s

and one who will likely be remembered alongside the hallowed kings of the genre decades from now